jQuery: how to trigger anchor link's click event

Question

Try the following:

$("#myanchor")[0].click()

As simple as that.

There's a difference in invoking the click event (does not do the redirect), and navigating to the href location.

Navigate:

 window.location = $('#myanchor').attr('href');

Open in new tab or window:

 window.open($('#myanchor').attr('href'));

invoke click event (call the javascript):

 $('#myanchor').click();

Even though this post is caput, I think it's an excellent demonstration of some walls that one can run into with jQuery, i.e. thinking click() actually clicks on an element, rather than just sending a click event bubbling up through the DOM. Let's say you actually need to simulate a click event (i.e. for testing purposes, etc.) If that's the case, provided that you're using a modern browser you can just use HTMLElement.prototype.click (see here for method details as well as a link to the W3 spec). This should work on almost all browsers, especially if you're dealing with links, and you can fall back to window.open pretty easily if you need to:

var clickLink = function(linkEl) {
  if (HTMLElement.prototype.click) {
    // You'll want to create a new element so you don't alter the page element's
    // attributes, unless of course the target attr is already _blank
    // or you don't need to alter anything
    var linkElCopy = $.extend(true, Object.create(linkEl), linkEl);
    $(linkElCopy).attr('target', '_blank');
    linkElCopy.click();
  } else {
    // As Daniel Doezema had said
    window.open($(linkEl).attr('href'));
  }
};

 window.open($('#myanchor').attr('href'));

               $('#myanchor')[0].click();

It worked for me:

     window.location = $('#myanchor').attr('href');